Notes and Editorial Reviews

Several decades ago, idly going through the contents of an obscure central European count’s dusty old library, an impecunious musicologist named Peter Schickele made the discovery of a lifetime: a deteriorating musical manuscript bearing the scratchy “X,” the signature of the hitherto unknown P. D. Q.Read more Bach, a distant descendant of the famous family (it was being used as a coffee strainer). Instantly, he became aware of his life’s mission—to expose this musical treasure to lovers of good music everywhere so that P. D. Q. might at last achieve the recognition so long denied him. The result, over a period of more than 40 years, has been multiple LPs, CDs, and concerts that have carried the message to the world—in this case, to the suburbs of Baltimore. But what a dastardly trick—to lure lovers of good music to a concert and then, after some obligatory vocal and chamber music by the Master, use the affair to promote your own highly derivative pop music. “Jekyll and Hyde,” indeed!

Granted, there are those who would even accuse P. D. Q. of occasionally borrowing things from his contemporaries and predecessors. Beethoven reputedly claimed that “playing one of your own compositions for P. D. Q. Bach is like asking a thief to take care of your suitcase for a few minutes,” a quote you will probably find in Thayer—then again, maybe you won’t. For example, there are some bars in the so-called “Moose” Quartet that are reminiscent of the phrase “Muss es sein? Es muss sein,” in Beethoven’s last quartet, hence the nickname. Bach’s songs, which use a bastard tongue called “Deuglish,” (prounced “DOY-glish”) a mixture of German and English, bear a remarkable resemblance (okay, sometimes bear a vague resemblance) to those of Franz Schubert.

After a few trivial, ah, brief rounds by the Master, Schickele gets down to the evening’s true business: the promotion of his own music, based on such diverse sources as boogie-woogie, country and western, soul, and folk—he even has the nerve to use Shakespeare (!) as his lyricist, perhaps imagining he can disarm legitimate criticism by becoming the tail to Shakespeare’s kite; it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the audience seems to have been seduced by this strategy; in fact, their reactions to the entire evening’s doings is quite enthusiastic from start to finish. O tempora! O mores!